Between the Kalajdžić burek shop and the Mušović burek shop there are exactly eleven steps. Benjamin Mušović first tried to count them when he was seven, as he set off across Bravadžiluk Street, but his father caught him by the collar on the sixth step and pulled him back inside. Across the street, on the threshold of the other shop, stood a little girl with braids, crying, because her father had just yanked her back by the arm too. That was in two thousand two. By then Ćazim Kalajdžić and Hakija Mušović had not spoken a single word to each other for six years, and until last Ramadan they had no intention of doing so.
Everyone in Baščaršija knows why. As boys, both had apprenticed under master Zulfo, who rolled out dough as thin as a headscarf and never said which apprentice he liked better. When he died, in the summer of ninety-six, he left behind two objects and one note. Ćazim got his sač, the baking lid, black and heavy as a bell, and Hakija got the big copper tray in which the pita had baked under that lid for forty years. The note said: "When you come to an agreement, you will bake a pita." Each believed everything belonged to him, and neither would give up his half. Within a year they had opened shops facing each other. Each hung his half on the wall, and beneath it the same photograph of Zulfo, in the same frame, bought in the same shop on Kazandžiluk.
From then on Bravadžiluk hosted a contest the neighbors followed like a football championship. Hakija opened at five forty-five, so Ćazim started opening at five thirty. Ćazim cut the price of a portion by twenty pfennigs, so Hakija started giving away a yogurt with every portion. When Ćazim hung up a new sign, Hakija hung up a bigger one. Whenever tourists asked for cheese burek, both men would step out onto their thresholds at the same moment and explain in the same voice that burek is only made with meat, and everything else is pita. It was the only thing they agreed on, and they agreed on it loudly, each looking off in his own direction.
Nejla Kalajdžić came back from Ljubljana last autumn, with a master's degree in economics and a laptop on which, within two weeks, she built a spreadsheet her father refused to look at. The spreadsheet showed that the Kalajdžić shop had been losing money for three years, that the rent was rising, and that twenty pfennigs of discount, multiplied by twenty-eight years of spite, had turned into serious money. She suggested a card terminal. Her father said a card was not money. She suggested they stop opening at five thirty, because at that hour the only people eating burek were bakers and Hakija. Her father said he would close the shop on the day Hakija turned off his lights first.
Benjamin Mušović had not gone anywhere. Since the age of fifteen he had been rolling out dough in his father's shop, from four in the morning, singing old sevdalinke as he worked, so quietly that only the pigeons on the roof could hear them. He had forearms that looked borrowed from some bigger man and the habits of an old one: coffee without sugar, newspapers read from the back page, no phone before noon. Nejla saw him up close for the first time in many years the winter the big snow fell, when the two of them, each in front of their own shop, were shoveling the same sidewalk until their shovels met in the middle. "Eleven," said Benjamin. "Eleven what?" "Steps. I counted." Nejla remembered the braids and the crying and laughed so loudly that her father came out onto the threshold.
Two weeks before Ramadan, Ćazim lifted a sack of flour and stayed bent over it like a man over a bill that does not add up. The doctor at the health center said he had a pinched nerve and that for three weeks he could not stand for more than five minutes. Three weeks in the middle of Ramadan, when before iftar the line on Bravadžiluk reaches all the way to the Sebilj fountain. Nejla tried to roll out the dough herself. It tore in the middle, then at the edges, then split across the whole table like an old map. On the first morning, at half past three, she sat down on a sack of flour and for the first time since coming back from Ljubljana she cried, quietly, although she was alone in the shop.
Someone knocked at the back door, the one that opened onto the passage behind the shop. Benjamin stood in the passage with an apron over his shoulder. "Your dad rolls to the left, and you roll to the right," he said. "That is why it tears." He did not wait to be invited in. He washed his hands at her tap, took her rolling pin, and in twenty minutes a sheet of dough lay across the table so thin you could see the flowers on the oilcloth through it. "At half past four I have to be back at ours," he said. "My dad must not know. And neither must yours." Nejla asked him why he was doing it. Benjamin shrugged. "Zulfo would have done it," he said, and did not look at her, which was the first sign he was not telling the whole truth.
It went on like that for twenty-one mornings. At half past three he knocked, and at half past four he left. In between they rolled dough together, he the pastry, she her patience, and at four they ate the predawn meal of the fast sitting on a sack of flour while he kept an eye on the clock. She learned that Benjamin had enrolled in university twice and twice come back to the table, because he could not imagine a morning without dough. He learned that in Ljubljana she had had a boyfriend who called burek pita, and that she had left him partly because of it. On the tenth morning she learned to roll to the left. On the fifteenth he watched her blow the flour off her forehead and forgot to sing. On the twentieth he kissed her, briefly, between two trays, and left five minutes later than usual.
Nothing on Bravadžiluk can be hidden for long. Hakija noticed that at half past four his son was arriving already white with flour. From customers who called to ask after his health, Ćazim heard that his burek was better than when he made it himself, which hurt him more than his back. On the twenty-first morning he got out of bed before the doctor's deadline, took a taxi to Baščaršija and came into the shop through the back door, like a thief into his own house.
He found Hakija Mušović's son up to his elbows in his dough, and his own daughter wiping flour off the young man's cheek. What followed could be heard all the way to the Sebilj. Ćazim shouted that they were stealing his recipe. Hakija came running across the street in his slippers, saw his son, and shouted that they were stealing his child. In front of the shop gathered the porters who were unloading goods, two taxi drivers from the stand, and a few people who were still eating their predawn meal in the ćevapi place next door. "My recipe!" shouted Ćazim. "Your recipe is Zulfo's recipe!" shouted Hakija. "We both stole it from him!" A silence fell, because it was the first time in twenty-eight years that either of them had said it out loud.
In that silence Nejla went to the wall and took down Zulfo's sač. It was heavier than she had thought and she had to hold it with both hands. Benjamin looked at her, wiped his hands on his apron and crossed Bravadžiluk. Everyone watched his lips move as he counted to eleven. He came back with the copper tray from his father's wall and set it on Ćazim's table. Nejla lowered the lid over it, and rim met rim as if someone had taken them apart only yesterday. "When you come to an agreement, you will bake a pita," said Nejla. "We have come to an agreement."
They baked the pita right there, in front of everyone, in a tray that had not seen fire for twenty-eight years, under a lid onto which Benjamin heaped embers from both ovens, Ćazim's and Hakija's. Nobody left. The ćevapi man brought out chairs. Someone played a sevdalinka on a phone, and Benjamin sang along quietly as he spread the embers. Tourists who came by around seven asked what was being celebrated and got an answer from six men at once, a different one from each. Ćazim sat on the chair his daughter had brought him for his back and stared at the lid. Hakija stayed standing, because he did not want to sit down first.
When the pita was done, Nejla cut it and set two plates on the table the ćevapi man had carried out into the middle of the street, on the sixth step, exactly between the two shops. The fathers sat down across from each other. For a long time neither ate. Then Ćazim took a piece, chewed it and said: "Too much salt." Hakija took his. "With you there was always too much salt," he said. They went on eating, not looking at each other, until the plates were empty, and then Hakija, without asking, reached over and took the last piece from Ćazim's plate.
A week later the Kalajdžić shop got a card terminal. The Mušović shop got one the next day, because Hakija refused to come second in anything. The lid and the tray now hang on the same wall, and Baščaršija is still arguing about whose. Benjamin still comes at half past three, only now through the front door, and Nejla waits for him on the threshold with two coffees, one without sugar.